Finding the breakout players for each MLS team
And rebutting an angry Nashville reader
This week’s MLSsoccer offerings, as the season preview train rolled on, were the annual breakout player predictions.
I’ve had a pretty good track-record with this over the years – some of my selections from last year were Diego Luna, Jake Davis, Bongi Hlongwane, Quinn Sullivan and Andrew Privett. My best call ever was probably Brandon Vazquez, who went from a deep reserve to a guy who scored 18 goals in the season I picked him, and has now been sold twice for a combined $19 million since then. Not bad!
But it was tough this season for a few teams, with two in particular – Cincinnati and Atlanta – standing out.
Truth is I don’t see a real breakout player for either. Both are mostly stocked with known quantities and that’s the point: it’s a conscious part of each team’s roster build. They want to win the talent battle up front and mitigate risk as much as possible, so promising but high-variance young players like Noah Cobb or Dado Valenzuela could get 1500 minutes and a bigger role, but much more likely is a “breakout” in which Pavel Bucha or Bartosz Slisz level up as an all-around midfield presence. It’s the type of breakout in which those guys go from being favorites in the comments section of local bloggers (or, I guess, in the Discords of local podcasters) to being recognized by fans around the league.
It’s the breaking containment into the wider MLS zeitgeist piece. And in fact I’d say that if those guys don’t break out in that sense, then something has probably gone wrong.1
And then there’s Nashville. My selection of Jonathan Pérez elicited a pretty nasty email from a former ‘Yotes person who argued that Hany Mukhtar and Jacob Shaffelburg have added elite 1v1 play over the years. I just completely disagree with that assessment, and since I took the time to respond to him this morning I thought I’d share you what I wrote:
On Jacob, he's got the old Cobi Jones trick of knocking the ball past someone then using his speed to run by them and get onto it before whipping in a cross, and obviously if he has a defender backpedaling in the open field he can be excellent. But that’s not really high-end 1v1 stuff because it only works in one phase of play.
Compare him to a guy like Johnny Russell, who would routinely make plays in isolation, even against a packed in defense. Beat one guy, force the defense to shift, get the center backs into rotation because of that danger, whip a cross across the 6… Shaffelburg may be working on stuff like that, but he’s not shown it with any regularity in the games.
As for Hany, he’s one of the three best open-field players in league history2, and can absolutely roast guys at pace. But in more compact situations he’s much better at pass-and-move combination play — Diego Valeri or Landon Donovan-like — than just twisting a guy into the ground a la Lucho Acosta or Sebastian Blanco. Again, he’s limited by the phase of play (which I think we saw more of last year as Nashville struggled to get out on the run with no Dax McCarty pulling the strings from deep in midfield).
I assume that skillset is why Gary always preferred to use Hany as a second forward rather than a true midfield creator or orchestrator. Giving him one less line of defense to beat, making sure he wasn’t dropping too deep (trying to get on the ball to make the game), and making sure he always had a partner to play off of seemed to be the right choice more often than not. Callaghan seems to have made the same assessment as he's already scrapped the 433 he wanted to play for a 442 with Hany up top.
Back to Perez: I do think it’s somewhat unlikely he becomes a breakout guy. From where I sit he just hasn’t been able to stitch goals and assists onto the end of those skill plays. That said, he was dominant at MLS Next PRO-level last year, and very useful in about 450 MLS minutes.
I’ll be happy to put a number to it. As per the “dribbling” part of American Soccer Analysis’s goals added metric3 Perez was +0.36 over those 450 minutes.4 On a per-96 basis that made him the ninth-most valuable 1v1 guy in the league, just ahead of Cucho and Luca Orellano, and just behind Gabriel Pec, Lucho, Federico Bernardeschi and David Martinez (another guy who made this year’s breakout player list). We’re talking MVPs, guys who have been (or will be) sold for eight figures, and Johnny Perez.
That’s pretty heady company! And if that ability continues to translate up from Next PRO to the first team, that’ll add a different kind of attacking element from Nashville have ever really had before, which would hopefully open up more tactical flexibility in re: phase of play effectiveness. Because if the opposing defense has to shade towards Perez, then that opens up more space for the likes of Hany and Shaffelburg and the rest. And since time and space are the name of the game, a guy like Perez can add value even if he’s not necessarily providing a ton of end product.
It would be a good, fun story if it plays out like that. Here’s to hoping.
Not necessarily catastrophically wrong, but the whole point in spending on those two guys is to fight the midfield battle to a stalemate (at worst) every single week. If that’s suddenly not happening – if these two teams are solving for opponents instead of forcing opponents to solve for them – then that lowers the ceiling on the whole enterprise.
Landon Donovan and Denis Bouanga, since I know you’re asking the question.
An all-in-one metric that assigns a value to every single event that happens on the field. You really should read the explainer. It’s not gospel, as events data has real blind spots, but it’s a very, very useful tool.
Hany was +0.13 in his 3074, and Shaffelburg was -0.12 in his 1570. It’s not that they’re bad dribblers, it’s that neither is going to break down a structured defense.